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Light-activated implant could spare babies from multiple heart surgeries
For babies born with a certain heart defect, implantation of a "shunt" is essential to their survival. A new type of shunt can be expanded using light, potentially eliminating the need for more heart surgeries that are currently needed to swap in larger shunts as the infant grows.
One of the key steps of that treatment involves connecting the aorta to the main pulmonary artery, in order to provide blood flow from the right side of the heart to the lungs. Prof. Christopher Rodell and colleagues at Philadelphia's Drexel University, its inner walls are lined with a hydrogel made up of polymer molecules surrounded by water. A paper on the Drexel study, which is being led by graduate student Akari Seiner, will be presented at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society.
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